


Nightmare

by Thimblerig



Series: The Lion and the Serpent [7]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Gen, Milady's head is not a happy place, The one where Aramis and Milady are girlfriends, secrets and lies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2015-10-31
Packaged: 2018-04-29 02:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5113301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>For this alone she is tempted to keep him.</em>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightmare

They do not often share a bed. It would not look entirely proper for the 'respectable widow' she often travels as and, in that half world in which she truly lives the appearance of propriety is - like discretion and a sharp blade - at once tool, weapon, and shield, to be discarded only at need though without regret. 

So it is rare that she sleeps beside Aramis. But sometimes - when they spend the night hiding in a half-wrecked barn, or pose as husband and wife, or there are enough funds to rent a suite and Kitty-the-Maid gets her own room, sometimes they lie together close enough to feel the other's body heat and hear the hiss of the other's breath.

Aramis is a polite bed-companion; for this alone she is tempted to keep him. Clean in person and linen, he lies neatly in his allotted space, never stealing the blankets, and when dreams hound him he keeps his whimpers quiet. Sometimes his lips move, as if names seek to drift out of the depths of his heart. She could supply some of those names, she imagines, _Anne_ and _Adele_ and a few more - Aramis the King's Musketeer of Paris had a reputation, not all of which was the speculation of the curious and idle. (But what should she care? Names are flimsy things. She has used and discarded many, in her time.)

She herself has no pretence of manners when the lights are out. She tosses and turns, she kicks and snarls, and she regrets not a bit of it. (Regret is a useless encumbrance, a weight to throw off one's stride. Regret must be discarded instantly.) She half-inches the blankets over herself and turns over, grumbling.

In the darkest watch of the night, when slow deep breaths are all that distinguish him from a dead man, she rolls over so that the layers of cloth about her rustle and her mouth is to his ear. And she tells him things.

The bargains a woman on her own might make, and the desperate choices when sanctuary is lost. The crunch of gravel underfoot and the swirl of seawater about her ankles on an English beach at the dark of the moon (never ask why she was there). The deal she struck with the late lamented Lord de Winter and why his title is her favourite sobriquet. The bitter chill of her seventh winter in Paris, huddled in the corner of a dank tenement as her lungs filled with fluid, too weak to kick away the rats, knowing that if she died no-one would care, no-one would even notice. She speaks in passing of the men she's lain with, the men she's killed (those she remembers). Tragedies that she's seen and heard, tragedies that she makes very sure happen to _other_ people, never herself.

Much of it she has said before, in some other fashion. A good lie is often truth set turnabout and sharpened to a point.

Sometimes she leans over him, the loose cambric billows of her shift and her long hair spilling around her, and she wraps her hand around his throat, so that the slow pulse of his blood beats against her palm.

"Eh, Aramis, will you take my confession?" she says, soft as a snake drooling venom onto stone. He doesn't deny her. "I once talked a woman onto her pyre and I smiled when she cursed me. What do you think of that, hm?" He continues to sleep, silent as the dead and without their condemnation.

She lays herself back down and shuts her eyes. A polite bed-companion is Aramis, and easy to rest with. (She has no reason to discard him at this time.) She lets herself sink.

If sometimes in his sleep he turns himself into her with his nose buried in her elf-locked hair, if he strokes her arm gently and whispers daft little soothements, it doesn't matter what name he thinks she carries that night. It really doesn't matter.

It will all be forgotten by morning.

**Author's Note:**

>  _I once talked a woman onto her pyre, and I smiled when she cursed me._ \- So, where Milady heaved herself up from the gutter, and that time she (probably) tried to go straight ended in a hanging, and she had to do dirty jobs for the Cardinal as the price for survival and what freedom she got, Ninon had all this money and status giving her a safety net when she edged the rules (until it went away, of course). Plus she flirted with Milady's husband. That's a thing.
> 
> And then there's how Milady directly contributed to a feisty woman getting hauled into a jacked-up trial ruled by autocratic men, with a hasty and painful execution at the end of it.
> 
> I think, if Milady were to let it, the story of Ninon might bother her exceedingly.
> 
> For the sake of a bit more fraughtness, I'm positing that the Cardinal didn't bother telling Milady he granted a secret reprieve at the last minute.
> 
> Good thing Milady doesn't believe in regret, amirite?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [a still and silent moment](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8792563) by [Thimblerig](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thimblerig/pseuds/Thimblerig)




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